Saturday, April 30, 2016

I've got something grilled up medium rare for tonight's Saturday Night Special, and as a bonus, it's in "Space-Vision, A Step Beyond 3D!"

It's called "The Bubble" and it escaped into the general public in 1966!

The Bubble" is basically a weird freakin' one man extended "Twilight Zone" episode, and that one man is:

Mr. Arch (Light's Out) Oboler!

"The Bubble" has a very small interactive cast! Despite how strange and odd it might be, you have to think that Arch knew exactly what he was doing!

The three main cast members are Michael, 123 episodes of "Mod Squad" as Pete Cochran, Cole, Deborah (GIDGET) Walley, and singer, songwriter Johnny Desmond, who sang with both the Glenn Miller, and the Gene Krupa orchestras! "The Bubble" might not be the greatest movie in the world, but, without a doubt, it sure had one Helluva pop culture cast!

So what the Hell happened? Their small aircraft went down in an uncharted area during a storm, and though the area is inhabited, the residents seem incapable of direct communication!

The residents are all like a bunch of robots, but it takes our stalwart trio forever to think anything is wrong, even though they can never communicate with the locals, who all just keep repeating their individual mantras over and over again, ad nauseum!

Here's the kicker! "The Bubble" is in 3D, so there are lots of shots in your face that have no purpose other than to show off the "Space Vision" 3D technology!

Like here, where a tray of beer bottles floats around mysteriously! Arch never bothers to try and explain why things like this are happening, you just have to accept it!

It's a great little town, and give Arch some credit here! Rent a carnival ride for nickels on the dime, and put it in the middle of main street, and you have unquestionable weirdness!

Most of the town looks like pieces of abandoned movie sets (That I'm sure Arch was able to get his hands on for a pittance)!

"The Bubble" was also released as "Fantastic Invasion Of Planet Earth," and if this is not the most deceiving poster of all time, then I don't know what is! It ain't in space, it's not fantastic, and there sure as Hell aren't any flying saucers like that in this movie, except every once in a while, some hovering object extracts somebody or something through a hole in the top of the dome, or dishes out a fiery death! This poster is possibly the worst example of false advertising in the history of film making! "A Sci-Fi experience that will blow your mind?" "A Spaced Odyssey?" Somebody was smoking something!!

This is the big alien listening/feeding booth that the locals go into to get their zombie fix!

Johnny messes with the hot seat in the big pod and that's when the eerie "floating masks" ala "Terror In The Haunted House" come into play!

It's all too weird so the trio accompanied by Johnny's new girlfriend, the hypnotized dance hall girl, decide to pack it in and head out of town! It won't take long for them to find out that there is no way out! Johnny is a ladies man and a lover, so you just have to wonder what their sex life was like!

It's hard to sleep when you're some kind of zombie/robot/freak! Deborah has no choice except to keep on nursing her newborn child!

They stick something in your face every chance they get!

Damn! We're trapped in some kind of humongous bubble, and there is no explanation as to why!!

WTF!??

Mike's character is taken all the way to the edge, and beyond! At one point he even wants to kill their baby just to save it's life!

Digging for God only knows how long, and how deep, Mike finally finds an opening underneath the bubble's wall, and as Arch would expect me to do, that's just where I'm going to leave it!
If you've got an Amazon Prime account, "The Bubble" streams for free right here!
Lights Out Ya'll!!

2 comments:

Arch Oboler was a phenomenal radio story teller, but his movies never seemed to have the punch of his audio classics. I don't know why, but he would have done better to write and produce his films and leave the directing to someone who knew what they were doing.

DWRAYGER DUNGEON PRESENTS: The Monster Movie Music Manifesto

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